Some years she employed a neighbor boy or girl, and always hired such other help as she needed.  Prices were sometimes low and crops were not always good; and only widowed mothers can know the full story of her labor, love and sacrifice.  With Percy’s help he was sent to school and finally to the university, choosing for himself the agricultural college, much to the surprise and disappointment of his devoted mother.

“Why,” she asked, “why should my son go to college to study agriculture?  Have you not studied farming in the practical school of experience all your life?  Surely we have done as much as could be done on our own little farm; and you have also had the benefit of the longer experience of our best farmers hereabout, and of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors.  Oh, I had hoped and truly believed that you would become interested in engineering, or in medicine, or may be in the law.  I cannot understand why you should think of going to college to study farming.  Surely you already know more than the college professors do about agriculture.”

Percy’s mother had too much good sense to have raised a spoiled boy.  He had been taught to work and to think for himself.  She loved her boy far better than her own life,—­loved as only a widowed mother can who has risked her life for him, and who has given to him all her thought and all her energy from the best twenty years of her own life; but she had never let herself enjoy that kind of selfishness which prompts a mother to do for her child what he should be taught to do for himself.  Despite his natural love of sport and the severe trials he had often brought to her patience and perseverance during his boyhood days, he had reached a development with the advance of youth that satisfied her high ideal.  His love and appreciation and tender care for her repaid her every day, she told herself, for all the years of watching, working, waiting.  Never before had he withstood her positive wish and final judgment.

And yet it was she who had told him that he alone must choose his life work and his college course in preparation for that work; but, after the years of toil, she had not dreamed that he would choose the farm life.

“My darling boy,” she continued, “it leads to nothing.  This little farm is poorer to-day than it was when your dear father and I came here to live and labor.  To be sure, the lower field still grows as good or better crops than ever; but I can remember when that field was so wet and swampy that it could not be cultivated, and it was in the work of ditching and tiling that field,” she sobbed, “that your father took the sickness that caused his death.”

Tears were in Percy’s eyes as he put his arm about his mother and wiped her tears away.